


Accidents Will Happen

by rotbody



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Amputation, Gore, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-17 01:15:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9297737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rotbody/pseuds/rotbody
Summary: How Junkrat lost his bits, here and there.About the scars, but also about what’s missing and what’s remembered.





	

When he’s young, after the Omnium blew but before he got smart, when everything is turning to rot and waste around him, he experiments. It had been the most beautiful, horrible, awe inspiring, pants wettingly terrifying thing he had ever witnessed, that explosion, and he reckons it musta jostled something loose in his brain because all he wants to do is recreate it. Possess even a little of that wild, awful magic. He’s in with the survivors and refugees, in a camp that’ll belong to Junkers in a few years, and he steals what he can, chemicals with names he can’t pronounce yet (but he’ll learn), mixes it all together and it blows up in his face. He loses the thumb and the first two fingers of his right hand that way, leaves him with half a hand that never feels much of anything after that. Too scarred and damaged to ever be useful again, so he learns to use the left.  
  
Couple years later, he’s _in_ the Omnium, along with the other desperate scrappers, scavving what they can, going crazy from hunger and thirst and radiation and each other. Every one of them trying to get something, anything that ’ll get them a ticket out. He doesn’t know how it happens, but there’s places in the old shell that are still armed, still ticking, dynamite waiting for its fuse to be lit. Rat didn’t strike the match, he’s pretty sure about it, but someone did and the place blows a second time. Less devastating, not nuclear, but it blows apart Junkers and leaves him deep in the bones, right arm all shredded and bleeding out. He remembers not really caring, that was his shit limb anyway, but he also remembers being scared, terrified that he’s going to die down there in the dark, in the wreckage and alone.  
  
He remembers that he was pulled out by someone, can’t remember her face but he was near half dead so you can’t fault him there. He was dragged out, only one caught in that boom still breathing, and wasn’t that fucked up? Just him. Local sawbones sees him eventually, cleans up his arm until it ends in a nice clean stump and tells him to stay away from the Omnium’s bones.  
  
So he goes back two weeks later. Doesn’t find the Thing for a couple more years, and shit, he still doesn’t know if that fixed his life or ruined it. Changed it either way. Set all of the outback screaming after him to boot.  
  
He’s on the run, getting away from one gang of Junkers when he steps in it, literally. It’s like he just shoved his fingers into a generator, like he’s being stabbed with a thousand knives, like he’s being burned and frozen all over all at once. He’s over on the ground before he realizes, blacks out and comes to to see his right leg jammed up in the biggest damn claw trap he’s ever seen. Huge jagged metal teeth sinking deep into the skin above his right knee. He’s got no fat to cushion that, and every time he even fucking _breathes_ he can feel the teeth scrape and gnaw against bone. And the Junkers are catching up to him.  
  
There’s a cloud on the horizon, smoke and choking wasteland dust and he knows it’s them coming for him. He knows he’s dead if he’s caught, so he does the sensible thing. Straps his belt good and tight round his thigh, ‘til the bleeding slows and the skin starts to go pale white around the leather. Takes his good ol’ hunting knife and hacks away. Fights down pain and wave after wave of nausea as he hacks through meat and bone until the leg falls away and he can scrabble across the dirt, leaving the limb all twisted up in the trap, leaving a good bit of his blood there. He leaves a trail of it, too, has to crawl all the way until he finds somewhere safe enough, but shit, he’s free. If that’s the price he’s gotta pay to live another day, keep his treasure away from their hands, he guesses he’s gotta pay it.  
  
There’s other bits of him missing, too, like the hunk of flesh carved outta his left thigh, a memento from the sniper that had hunted him for near five days before he could shake 'em. He still wakes up in a cold sweat sometimes, remembering it in dreams, the feeling of eyes on him, of shots that come from nowhere, of knowing that he’d never even face his killer. And there’s the little toe on his last remaining foot, the one that he had blasted off when he stupidly mistimed a jump onto one of his mines.  
  
And there are still other things, the less obvious things that are missing. Most of his hearing these days (but his right is still better than his left, in that regard), and the memories of before that god-damned beautiful terrible explosion, of good times before he starved and scavved so he wouldn’t die. Maybe he misses those things, all his old bits and bobs, maybe he doesn’t, he couldn’t say and why would he bother to linger on it? If it’s gone, it’s gone.  
  
He tells Roadhog everything, bits and pieces, because, shit, who else is going to listen? Who else is going to care? Maybe he embellishes some things, downplays others. Maybe he doesn’t tell Roadhog how he had cried and baked under the wasteland sun for hours while he laid in the trap, maybe he doesn’t mention that going back into the Omnium was the worst idea he ever had. Because what’s he going to care?  
  
  
He tells him just to have stories to share, to keep him interested, to keep his attention, at least in the beginning. The big fucker laughs a little, ‘specially when Rat mentions his limbs getting tore off, blasted apart. The sadistic bastard. Maybe that’s when his heart first twists and turns for the giant bastard. When he tells the guy how his bits got ripped off, tells the guy about the pain and the panic and he just laughs, no sympathy.  
  
  
Yeah, he likes that. Likes that when he tells the stories, Roadhog looks at him, watches him, always appraising. Like he’s trying to decide when Rat’ll blast himself apart for good, or trying to figure out if this is goin’ to be worth it, if Rat’s so determined to blow up at every opportunity. Nah, he’s gonna _make_ it worth it, damnit. Maybe the tall tales are just the first step, but it’s a start, he’s gonna make Roadhog like him, some way or other, try'n get him to stick around for more than just money and mayhem.


End file.
